The Steel Remains (47 page)

“From a legal point of view—”

He shook his head. “Forget the law. It isn't going to help. They'll cite it where it suits them, ignore it where it doesn't. They're
clerics,
Archeth. They spend their whole fucking lives selectively interpreting textual authority to advantage. We have to hamstring them before they even get started.” He bridged his hands and brooded. “Basically, Archeth, you have to disappear for a while.”

“And Elith.”

“Oh, all right, yes. Fine. Your northern witch as well. Works out better like that anyway, I suppose. With both of you gone, the whole basis for their grievance collapses.” He nodded slowly, but with building vigor. “Yeah, that'll work. That will work. We get you out of the city under cover, before nightfall. I'll have Faileh Rakan put together an escort squad to do it. Meantime, I agree to an emergency session of the mastery and field the Citadel's demands. We send for you, you're nowhere to be found. Repeated summons, no result. With a bit of prevaricating— and the Holy fucking Mother knows it's what the court does best— that gets us to some early hour tonight. By the time it's clear that you've fled, it's dark and you could be anywhere. I undertake to have the militia out scouring the streets for you at dawn. When they don't find you, we say we've sent out the King's Reach as well. Might even do it with a few of them I can trust to look in the wrong places and keep their mouths shut about it. Anyway: Rumors of you heading northwest for Trelayne, or maybe into the wastes. Doing all we can, gentlemen, thank you for your time. We'll keep you posted.” He wagged a finger at Archeth. “Meantime, we stash you …where? Any idea where you'll go?”

And something moved in her head like the oiled components of a fireship hatch mechanism, everything sliding and locking into new configurations. She almost heard the solid clunk as it happened. A fresh excitement shouldered the krin crash aside, picked up the beat in her veins. She cleared her throat.

“I had thought of Ennishmin, my lord.”

ation of winter trees. Faint odor of decay on a slack and sickly breeze.

At first, Ringil registered the change with little more than weary mistrust. His time in the Aldrain marches had shown him far worse, and the shift had not been without its advance warnings. The great black road they'd met Risgillen and the others on had been fading for some time now, either aging at some fantastically accelerated rate as they walked it, or rotting through from beneath as they pressed into new territory that would not permit its existence. Jagged cracks started to appear, some broad and deep enough to put an incautious foot in and snap your ankle. Ringil thought he saw human skulls wedged down into them at intervals, but that might have been another marchland hallucination, and he was getting numb to those.

Well, most of them.

JELIM COMES BACK TO HIM ONE MORE TIME, PERHAPS IN A DREAM WHILE
they're camped on the road, perhaps not; in the marches it's hard to tell. This time Ringil is standing above him with the Ravensfriend across his back, though slanted the wrong way, pommel jutting over his right shoulder. The difference feels bizarre, uncomfortable. Jelim stops a short distance away and looks up without speaking. The face is the same, though stained and mottled with weeping, but he's dressed in far finer garb than the real Jelim, minor merchant's son that he was, had ever been able to afford. He stares up at Ringil, meets his eyes, and fresh tears start down his cheeks. Ringil feels a deep aching in his chest at the sight. He wants to speak, but the words are jammed up in his throat.

I'm sorry,
Jelim weeps.
Gil, I'm so sorry.

And now the pain in Ringil's chest will not be contained. It rips through him, upward and downward, right up into the muscles of his shoulder, right down to—

I'm sorry, Gil, I'm so sorry.
Jelim seems to whisper it endlessly, staring up in horrified fascination.
It should have been me.

And the thing that juts from his right shoulder is not the pommel of the Ravensfriend at his back, it's the end of the impaling spike where they drove it through the final nine inches and locked the mechanism in the base of the cage, and the pain is not an ache in his heart, it's an oceanic, white- hot shredding, scalding agony that drives up from between his legs and rips through his guts and then across his chest, neatly avoiding his heart so he need not die for days…

I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

And then he's screaming, as he realizes where he is, shrieking, for mercy, for Hoiran, for his father, for his mother, for anyone or anything to come and stop the pain. Screaming with such force that it seems it must blow his veins apart, explode his skull, shatter it and let his lifeblood drain out through the ruined mess.

But he knows it won't.

And he knows that no one will come, that in the long, slow- leaking agony ahead, there will be no rescue of any kind.

HE STAMPED DOWN ON THE MEMORY, BATHED IN SUDDEN SWEAT, HEART
hammering. Focused on where he was instead.

Winter trees. Quiet.

He stood and stared up at the stripped branches. Waited for the panic- flush of sweat across his skin to cool, for his heart to slow back down. He breathed in deep, like a man escaped from drowning.

Not real, not real.
His pulse throbbed with the rhythm of the words.

No more real than the thousand other phantoms that had haunted him across the Aldrain marches. He had not died.

Jelim had.

A hand clapped him across the back. His pulse kicked up again for one terrified moment, then eased as he registered the touch. Seethlaw's hand shifted, squeezed intimately at the nape of his neck.

It felt uncomfortably like ownership.

“Nice to be back in the real world, I imagine,” the dwenda mur mured, and stepped past him across the tufted, swampy ground. Tiny squelching noises in the stillness with each step the dwenda took. Ringil saw water well up in the boot prints he left.

The other members of the party followed, Risgillen with wrinkled nose and a sour glance cocked up at the trees, Ashgrin as watchful and impassive as he'd been since Ringil met him. Only Pelmarag acknowledged the human, turned as he passed and gave him a wink.

“Where are we?” Ringil asked.

“Journey's end,” said Pelmarag. “Hannais M'hen the Cursed. Look.”

He gestured out to the left, and Ringil felt a tiny start in his pulse as he saw a stunted black figure there. It took him a moment to realize it was a statue, a moment longer to realize
—how?—
that it would not, as the akyia had done in the surf, suddenly move and come to silent, bright- eyed life.

“Tell you a funny story,” Pelmarag said, advancing on the statue without any apparent trace of amusement on his face. Ringil shrugged and followed him.

It waited there for them, set at a tilted angle in the marshy ground, stubby outstretched arms raised to shoulder height on either side like a
diminutive preacher facing his congregation or a child asking to be picked up. As Ringil got closer, he saw that the thing was hewn entirely out of black glirsht, sculpted crudely so the body wore no obvious clothing and the face was a blunt, asexual approximation of human features. He noticed the shallow- scooped facets that served as eyes were polished so the crystalline stone glinted, but he couldn't tell whether the effect was deliberate or not.

Pelmarag stared down at the statue, brow creased as if it had asked him a difficult question.

“Funny story?” Ringil reminded him.

The dwenda stirred. “Yeah. About a month and a half ago the way you people'd look at it, Ashgrin's brother Tarnval was looking for this place. He was real well equipped, too, came heavy. Never much cared for Seethlaw's stealth strategies, thought we were all moving way too slow.”

Pelmarag's Naomic, better than Risgillen's or Ashgrin's from the start, had become positively fluent in the time he'd spent talking to Ringil. He was by far the most gregarious of the group. In fact, he seemed to be acquiring a lot of Ringil's preferred expressions and phrasing. It gave the human a peculiar sensation to hear his own verbal quirks fed back to him this way, and it made him wonder how much time the journey in the Aldrain marches was really taking. How learning and experience might— or even could— function without fixed reference to time.

“Yeah, always one for a frontal assault, Tarnval.” Pelmarag grimaced, apparently at something only he could see. “And he talked a pretty fight, too. Pretty enough to get the support he needed. So, he had about three dozen of us at his back, some storm- callers of reputation among the company. All set to take back Hannais M'hen the Cursed, turn back the clocks, undo all the harm the Black Folk wrought here. We unleashed the talons of the sun through the aspect storm before we deployed, clearing a path. We came storming through in their wake. And you know what? We ended up over a thousand miles southwest of here, up to our waists in seawater on the beach at some shit- hole little imperial port. All because some fucking idiot human moved the marker.”

Not sure if he was supposed to laugh or not, Ringil made a noncommittal noise. Pelmarag's mouth twisted again with the memory.

“Had to fight our way up off that beach,” he said softly. “We lost six
or seven dwenda doing it. Across town and up the hill, fucking humans everywhere, running around screaming and jabbering in the dark like the lost souls of apes, you know, cut one down and there's another right fucking behind it. We took another five casualties, and Tarnval himself down by then with a chest wound, searched that fucking town, tore it apart till we finally found our beacon. And when we finally did, we found they'd moved the fucking thing and we were nowhere close to where we were supposed to be. No Hannais M'hen, cursed or otherwise. We were south, way south. And with
that
kind of sun coming up in a couple of hours’ time, well…nothing to do but collect the dead and injured, let the storm- callers take us back out of there. Tarnval died from the storm- stress on the way out, so did a couple of others. After that?” Pelmarag shrugged. “We all went back to listening to Seethlaw.”

“Talking about me again?”

Seethlaw had come up behind them. His expression as he looked at Pelmarag was unreadable.

“Just a little reflection on strategy.”

“Yeah?” Seethlaw put a hand on Ringil's shoulder. Something chilly poured into the air between the two dwenda. “Gil here isn't a part of our strategy, Pel. He doesn't need to know anything about it.”

Pelmarag held the other dwenda's gaze. He said something short and bitten- sounding in the language they used when Ringil was not included in the conversation, then turned away and went to join the others. Seethlaw grunted and nodded after him, a quick, chin- jutting gesture that had nothing friendly in it.

“So what's that all about?” Ringil asked.

“Nothing that concerns you.” Seethlaw's grip on his shoulder tightened slightly. “Come on. We're not there yet.”

THROUGH THE WINTER TREES, ALONG PATHS THROUGH THE SWAMP THAT
the dwenda either knew by heart or could sense without much effort. Ringil took an experimental detour at one point, around the other side of a rotting tree stump, and found himself abruptly up to his shins in
yielding black morass. Gray, soupy water pooled rapidly in the holes he'd made and brought with it a stench like death. He floundered back out, boots liberally streaked and plastered with mud. No one said anything, but he thought he caught Risgillen sneering. He stayed carefully in file after that.